Resumo

The purpose of this article is to discuss and analyze how the founding idea of the religious exceptionalism was reflected in immigration policies. The idea of unique and exemplary trajectory to the world, “New Israel”, of Manifest Destiny in the Constitution of the American identity helps us to think about the production of otherness in this context. We’re going to do in this article a contextualization of the idea of religious exceptionalism and the main immigration policies from American history, until the Government of Donald Trump, focusing on how the other is taken and treated within the internal political context. From this analysis, we can see that the public debate about the American immigration policies has been based on exclusive governmental acts and xenophobic organizations, finding support and legitimacy in the face of a considerable portion of population.